Thesis v12

“Home, rather than being a specific geographic location, is more and more about a set of personal activities, habits, and relationships than an established continuum of habitation in the same location.” (Swartz-Claus, 23)

Thesis

The automobile culture of the past century has allowed Americans to be more mobile and more expansive. But at the same time a stigma has developed against the mainstays of American nomadism, especially the mobile home and the trailer park. American’s neo-nomadic movement will have to address both the individual elements of a nomadic lifestyle (the units) and at the same time tackle the social and community implications associated with the move away from a distinctly urban society (the hubs). The way the American nomadic culture is developed must acknowledge a greater level of economic and environmental sustainability.

Theme

The average American moves every six years, spends seven weeks of every year in a car and upwards of $6,000 annually on their car. Americans are members of a growing throwaway consumer culture, where every commodity has a limited lifespan, even the house one lives in.

The automobile is an omnipresent element in American society, culture, and economics — so pervasive that its impact is often overlooked not only by the average American, but often by civic leaders and city planners. It has encouraged the development of a transient population and put a strain on traditional forms of city development. The American city is expected to provide ample housing to accommodate rapidly growing and frequently moving populations while at the same time providing a vast network of infrastructure to facilitate the commuter, the traveler and the upwardly mobile.

We may soon look back to “The Age of the Automobile” with wry nostalgia. A seemingly endless flow of inexpensive oil allowed America’s car culture to aggressively expand. Increased demand for oil in other world markets and recent disruptions in domestic oil production have stretched supplies and driven costs to new heights. The biological principle that growth is controlled by the scarcest resource available is equally applicable in economics, and indicates that the increasing scarcity of oil will significantly impact our car culture as well as our urban culture. The current expectation of maintaining both a house and a car -- one’s landed-ness and one’s personal mobility respectively -- is already being strained by changes in the availability of oil. However, the expectation of mobility has not yet been impacted noticeably by dramatically increased prices of fuel.

In order to adapt to these pressures, a choice will have to be made between the dream of the landed gentry and the desire for personal mobility. Despite the best intentions of architects and urban planners, Americans will continue to consider mobility a birthright.

There are three primary issues to be explored before development of prototypes can begin: sociology, sustainability, and economy. The principles of the American nomad movement can be defined by delving into the existing implications and research in these three areas, projecting the impact a nomadic lifestyle will have and predicting the effectiveness of these developments.

Vehicle

These issues will be explored at three scales:

Urban— an understanding of the urban implications of a large transient population has been needed for a while. As Americans have become more mobile, socially and physically, the result has been uncontrolled growth and sprawl. The infrastructural and cultural needs of a more mobile society will need to be reconsidered, with special care given to the importance of community groups, anticipation of use patterns, and the consequences of the transport and aculturalization of individuals.

Organizational— a focused development of architecture as furniture. Developing means and methods for distribution, assembly, upgrading, replacement, and transportation of the elements of a house will be the primary concerns. This includes an intense investigation into the size, use and makeup of spaces that make up a building as interchangeable modules. [is this still important?]

Architectural — based on developments in materials and methods that allow architecture to make a minimal impact on the environment while at the same time making it less materially transient and more mobile. This will include a strong emphasis on prefabrication and sustainability. [dependent on later investigations into materiality]

A series of small projects will be pursued to test the needs and limitations of this lifestyle as well as to establish potential cultural implications. Several prototypes will be examined that will focus on different mobile lifestyles: the ever-moving and the semi-nomadic; the single-family and the bachelor; and means of locomotion. The first dichotomy focuses on the difference in use, whether it is mostly transient or more related to the upwardly mobile segment of American homeowners who move regularly to bigger and better surroundings. The second will be an exploration of the different needs of a family with multiple members as opposed to the relatively simple bachelor lifestyle. The final category will explore a variety of options for the means of “nomadicity”[1].

Several client groups will be identified and critiqued in order to best determine the needs and desires of the new nomads.

All of the prototypes developed will rely heavily on techniques of prefabrication, developments in materials technology, and sustainability practices.

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[1]"Nomadicity is the tendency of a person, or group of people, to move with relative frequency.” From “Definition of nomadicity,” Definitions, Dictionary for Internet and Computing Technologies (24 March 2006), http://www.whatis.com (accessed 19 August 2006).